Saturday, February 28, 2015

Thursday, March 19th, 5-7 PMSuffolk University Law School, 1st floor120 Tremont Street, Boston, MAPanel discussion and receptionFree and open to the public

Even after 70 years, the full history of WWII is stillunfolding with the ongoing discovery of documents andbelated recognition of those who contributed to the Alliedvictory. The panel will contextualize the oftenunderrepresented role of women in war, the importance ofarchives in preserving the memory of war, and highlight thewartime experiences of women in Occupied France.Examples to be presented include noted writer IrèneNémerovsky, who composed "Suite Française" just beforeperishing at Auschwitz, and two heroines of the FrenchResistance, Germaine Tillion and Geneviève deGaulle-Anthonioz.

The event will also include a celebration of the donation ofthe papers of Margaret Collins Weitz, a noted scholar ofwomen in the French Resistance, to Suffolk University.

Panelists: James Carroll, Distinguished Scholar in Residence,Suffolk University (moderator)

Robert Allison, Professor and Chair, HistoryDepartment, Suffolk University

Friday, February 27, 2015

The other day I cited a Pew poll showing a very high level of tolerance of Islam in France. Recently, however, I began reading Laurent Bouvet's interesting (and controversial) new bookL'insécurité culturelle, which cites an IPSOS poll astonishingly at odds with the Pew findings. Indeed, whereas Pew suggests that 72% of the French have a "favorable" attitude toward Islam, IPSOS reports that 74% believe that Islam is "not compatible" with the values of French society. In short, the results are mirror images of each other.

So I did a little further digging, and it seems that there is substantial evidence in favor of the pessimistic conclusions of IPSOS:

I am sorry to have to make this correction, as I had found the Pew results quite encouraging. I don't know why their findings are so wildly different from these numerous other polls. But I feel compelled to correct the record. I have written to Pew for comment but have thus far received no reply.

Thursday, February 19, 2015

After the attacks in Paris, [Steeve] Briois [FN mayor of Hénin-Beaumont and party #2] personally reached out to the mosque to let its members know that he stood with them and to invite them to a rally in town. The Socialist community refused to attend the mayor’s rally — the Socialists held their own ­— but many Muslims did.

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Manuel Valls announced today that he would resort to Article 49-3 of the French Constitution because the Loi Macron had failed to attract enough support from the ostensible majority to pass. France is now ruled by a minority government, and the hopes of a new beginning raised by the election of Hollande in 2012 are officially dead, along with the always illusory "spirit of January 11." The irony of the situation is that the government has come to this sad pass over the anemic Loi Macron--a watered-down version of the Attali Commission report that has since been further watered down by a month of parliamentary horse trading. Yet despite all this furious backpedaling and bargaining, the left of the left still cannot swallow the modest Macron reforms, while the right will vote against the law, which contains nothing it hasn't supported in the past, solely to embarrass the government. The Valls government is now in a position of utter incoherence, reduced to waiting for something to turn up and without a semblance of unity regarding further reforms.

Monday, February 16, 2015

The recent terror attacks--first in Paris, now in Copenhagen--have heated French political rhetoric to the point where the language is melting, one word flows into another, and it's hard to tell where amalgame ends and impermissible excess begins. Prime Minister Valls, pulling out all stops to express France's "love" for its Jews and the "wound" it has suffered from the recent events, declared his opposition to "Islamo-Fascism," a term he no doubt meant to underscore the gravity of the threat and his commitment to maintain the heightened level of security he initiated after the January attacks. Then Roland Dumas, who served as foreign minister under Mitterrand (and was later involved in the "putain de la République" scandal), took issue with the term--which would have been permissible, since its contribution to understanding Islamist radicalism is debatable--but then could not prevent himself from alleging that Valls was "probably under Jewish influence" (apparently because his wife is Jewish). Dumas is carrying an old grudge from when Valls accused him of favoring the Palestinian side in the Israel-Palestine conflict. This very ugly exchange will unfortunately be another distraction, diverting the government's attention from where it needs to be focused. Deplorable.

Sunday, February 15, 2015

Useful information from Pew. Did you know, for instance, that 72% of the French have a positive view of Muslims, higher than in any other European country? Germany and Britain are next. And it so happens that France, Germany, and Britain are, in that order, the countries with the largest proportion of Muslims in their population. But Italy, the next country on the list in terms of percentage of Muslims in the population, has the lowest favorable view (just 28%).

Thursday, February 12, 2015

I can't remember where I read that Édouard Daladier, upon returning from Munich after signing the Munich Accord with Hitler and seeing his plane met by cheering crowds hailing the preservation of "peace," turned to an aide and said, "Quels imbéciles!" I doubt that François Hollande will be met by cheering crowds when he returns from Minsk, but he is no doubt as lucid as Daladier about the agreement he and Angela Merkel have just reached with Vladimir Putin.

At Harvard last week, I heard the French ambassador, Gérard Araud, denounce armchair warriors (perhaps he was thinking of John McCain?) who are willing to "die to the last Ukrainian" for a cause about which the adversary cares much more deeply, and in which he has a much greater interest, than one's own side. I have no wish to join the McCains of this world, and I am not prepared to die, or see my sons die, "for Donetsk," even knowing in retrospect that to "die for Danzig" or the Sudetenland would have been the right choice.

Still, and despite all the differences that make the analogy with 1938 suspect, and despite the slipperiness of all historical analogy in such matters, I can't help feeling that this isn't the end, that Putin will not stop with the Donbass any more than he stopped with Crimea (where I did believe, mistakenly, he would stop). His method, now well-honed, has been working only too well, and has made him remarkably popular at home (where the US is now seen as "the enemy" by nearly 80 percent of Russians).

Hollande would therefore be well-advised to avoid trumpeting victory, as Sarkozy did after he returned from another face-off with Putin over Georgia. I recognize the justice of all the arguments that say Ukraine is different, a substantial fraction of its population wants to be Russian, speaks Russian, and wants no part of the EU, for example. I think the EU and NATO made a mistake with their overtures to Ukraine, which is economically unprepared for EU membership and for which a NATO presence would be as militarily unpalatable to the Russians as Soviet missiles in Cuba were to the United States. The integration of Ukraine with Russia in the Soviet era was strong, and indeed, even today, the Russian ambassador to the US is Ukrainian by birth.

All that said, Europe has not seen this kind of naked military aggression in a very long time. It is unsettling to witness its return in a period of deep economic crisis and tension within the European Union.

Finally, we do not yet know what the US reaction to the European accord will be. It is hard to imagine the US going through with its threat to arm the Ukrainians, who must now refuse any such aid or break the agreement with Russia. But the impossibility of acting will only embolden McCain and his allies to scream louder than ever: for the American va-t-en-guerre, the fact that there is no question of his advice being acted on only increases the temptation to ever-greater ferocity. The war cries of the impotent are as effective a remedy for what ails them as injections of testosterone.

Monday, February 9, 2015

In Marseille, where police today faced automatic weapons fire in a housing project, two municipal councilors who had been members of the UMP have gone over to the Front National. One of them, Karim Herzallah, said that he was tired of being the UMP's "arabe de service." This explanation hardly makes his decision to join the enemy less surprising, however.

Sunday, February 8, 2015

The PS eked out a victory in the Doubs, 51.4 to 48.6. Participation was up over the first round, and the FN candidate received a substantial share of the UMP vote. So the worst was avoided, but the signs remain alarming for both the PS and the UMP. A prospective FN victory no longer frightens voters as in the past.

Meanwhile, Alain Juppé was jeered at a UMP party meeting after calling for a broad center-right coalition. And PS leader J.-C. Cambadélis warned his party that what it really needs to fear is not the old guard of the UMP--Sarkozy and Juppé--but the younger generation of Le Maires and Wauquiezs, who "think like Buisson [Sarko's disgraced far-right strategist] but present themselves like Juppé." He may have a point.

Thursday, February 5, 2015

François Hollande held his fifth news conference this morning in grand pomp sous les ors de la République. His most important announcement was that he and Chancellor Merkel would fly to Kiev this afternoon and then on to Moscow. But he also wanted to perpetuate what people have begun to call "l'esprit du 11 janvier," the burst of national unity and republican fraternity that broke out on the Sunday after the recent terror attacks.

And Hollande's rhetoric was in full republican spate. He hit all the cardinal points of the republican catechism: the schools are the key to the "reconquête" of France's minorities, a singularly ill-chosen word:

He also reaffirmed his belief in the naked public square and opposition to any recognition of "communities" within the nation, almost channeling Clermont-Tonnerre's "everything to the Jews as individuals, nothing to the Jews as a nation":

Well, it's one thing to tell people they "shouldn't" feel "segregated," quite another to arrange things so they don't. Hollande's statement thus marks a sharp step back from Manuel Valls forthright declaration that France was a de facto "apartheid" society--another word choice that has drawn criticism but that at least had the virtue of concentrating the mind, whereas Hollande's republican pablum suggests that a little jiggering of the school curriculum here and there will make everything fine again.

My disagreement with this view will emerge in a forum to be published soon by the Boston Review.

Throughout his life-long career in diplomacy, Gérard Araud has held such high-ranking positions as Permanent Representative at the United Nations (2009-2014), Director General for Political Affairs and Security (2006-2009), Ambassador of France to Israel (2003-2006) and Deputy Permanent Representative at NATO (1995-2000).

Busch Hall, 27 Kirkland St., 3:30-5 PM. I believe this event will also be streamed on video via the CES Web site.

Wednesday, February 4, 2015

The UMP has a serious problem on its hands: What to do about the second round of the District 4 by-election in the Doubs, in which the UMP candidate has been eliminated, leaving the PS to face the FN alone? Sarkozy for once retracted his jutting jaw and went all soft in the knees: No to the FN, but after that you're on your own. Juppé, seeing an opportunity to shore up his position as the "centrist" alternative to Sarko, stood droit dans ses bottes and proclaimed forthrightly that if he had a vote in the Doubs, he'd vote for the Socialist to bar the FN's way. Staunch resolution--except in the past he'd made the opposite choice. When this was pointed out on France2 news last night, Juppé was undaunted: the facts have changed, he said, the FN is much stronger now than it used to be. In other words, in the past he had to demonstrate his steadfast opposition to "socialo-commmunism," but now he needed to bolster his anti-racist credentials (he didn't fail to point out that the FN candidate had declared her belief in the supposedly self-evident fact that some races are superior to others).

There is a certain comic element to this ballet of pre-positioning, in that in this day and age of course the whole concept of "republican discipline" is a bit passé. Party loyalty is weak, voters do not depend on their party stalwarts for their information, and most will have their own preferences between the FN, the PS, and abstention and will make up their own minds accordingly. But la consigne de vote is one of the great rituals of French politics, almost as silly as the "endorsements" by defeated candidates in US presidential primaries, so it goes on year after year, a great tradition, as gullet-warming as a good pot au feu.

Monday, February 2, 2015

Yesterday's by-election in the Doubs is yet another demonstration of the crumbling of France's party system. The FN candidate, Sophie Montel, came in first with 32.6% of the vote. The PS candidate, Frédéric Barbier, narrowly avoided elimination with 28.6% of the vote, just ahead of a lackluster UMP rival. The UMP is split about what to advise voters in the second round: Nicolas Sarkozy is refusing to join a "republican front" and is sticking to a "ni-ni" position, supporting neither candidate, while others in the party are calling on voters to block the election of a third FN deputy.

Yes, it's just another by-election, but there are factors that give this election national significance. First, this was Pierre Moscovici's seat, and since Moscovici was finance minister and is now EU finance commissioner in Brussels and therefore partially held responsible for the EU's austerity policy, the vote has a transnational dimension. Second, the PS lost half of its votes compared with the last time Moscovici won the seat. Third, the abstention rate was very high, over 60%. Fourth, this is a working-class district, which includes the famous Peugeot plant at Sochaux. Despite this, the Front de Gauche has gone nowhere, while both the right and extreme-right parties have improved their position. There was a massive shift of votes from the PS to the FN, and even the UMP candidate picked up 3%, so to the extent that this vote was a referendum on national policy, the news remains bad for the PS, even after its presumed post-terror attack bump, which nearly doubled President Hollande's popularity rating. The following graph tells the story:

Sunday, February 1, 2015

Longtime reader Brent Whelan has a new blog. The theme is "the Road to Paris, 12/2015," referring to the upcoming conference on the climate. This will be a major event of the political year, and I expect to follow Brent's observations closely. Over the years I've been kept on my toes by Brent's always perceptive and often provocative comments from a point to my left on the political spectrum.

Newsletter Subscription

Site Statistics

Followers

About This Site

I have been a student and observer of French politics since 1968. In that time I've translated more than 130 books from the French, including Tocqueville's Democracy in America and Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. I chair the seminar for visiting scholars at Harvard's Center for European Studies and am a member of the editorial board of French Politics, Culture, and Society and of The Tocqueville Review/La revue Tocqueville. You can read some of my writing on French politics and history here and a short bio here. From time to time I will include posts by other students of France and French politics (accessible via the index link "guest"). My hope is that this site will become a gathering place for all who are interested in discussing and analyzing political life in France. You can keep track of posts on Twitter by following "artgoldhammer".